Flashes of Panic

I’ve spent some time in the last week searching the web for those precious documents that tell me HOW TO do stuff. How to fix my broken rmagick installation. How to make a series of one-page PDFs into one multi-page PDF. How to make TrueType fonts accessible to Ghostscript.

About that last one. Seems like the basic steps are, “Put the font file in the right directory. Then update the font map file with it.” OK, I get that. It’s that second one that’s the problem: every description of updating the font map file shows a format which is not at all like the one my version of Ghostscript has.

And this is where I passionately wish one of these how-to guides was a weblog post. If it was a weblog post, it would have a date on it. And then, even though the writer has (ugh) neglected to mention which version of Ghostscript they used in their how-to, I’d have a good idea of how old the article is, and whether I should consider it current information or not.

I’d rather have a sketchy description of how it works with a recent date than a step-by-step hand-holding guide to a too-old version of the software.

(I still haven’t solved the Ghostscript problem, but the trick seems to be finding the font map file in the first place. On my Mac, it turned out to be in /usr/local/share/ghostscript/8.54/lib/Fontmap.GS.)

Now Playing: Here & Now from Aurora Gory Alice by Letters To Cleo

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